Cloud Smart is the new strategy for helping federal agencies realize the cloud’s full potential for scaling and optimizing resources, accelerating application delivery, lowering maintenance costs and transforming the citizen experience. Booz Allen Vice President Dan Tucker has been sharing practical considerations on where to focus as the strategy unfolds.

Reuse resources and rethink economics

“For accelerating IT modernization, agencies have a world of successful commercial and federal implementations to draw from,” Tucker wrote in GCN, a magazine covering public sector IT. “Rather than reinvent the wheel with new tools, applications, infrastructure, and ideas, use proven approaches that already exist.”

On the economic side, agencies need to factor in all of the cloud’s potential benefits. These include higher velocity delivery, the ability to leverage infrastructure as code, lower barriers to innovation, and an expedited approach to updates and patching.

Agencies can encourage new development spending with goals and metrics. “Redirecting the budgetary focus from operations and maintenance to new capabilities is a significant shift from the status quo,” Tucker wrote. “Agencies can incentivize and accelerate the transition through setting measurable goals that reflect migration to a contemporary, cloud-native world.”

Put data first

“[Cloud] strategies can be interrupted or halted by the most challenging aspect of an IT modernization initiative: their data layer,” Tucker wrote in an article for Nextgov magazine. “Inside this data are the insights to alerting agencies to failing systems, malicious hacker activity, and other problems before it’s a full-scale crisis or the information government needs to make more accessible to its citizens.”

He suggested that federal agencies ask themselves:

What are your future information needs?

How are you going to acquire and govern the data to meet those needs?

What is the best architecture to support these needs?

How do you provide access to those who need it, while maintaining security and privacy controls?